For These Minor Leaguers, the Living Is Good if You Don’t Mind the Dead Below

Players in the lower levels of professional baseball often
settle for less-than-desirable living arrangements, but few
residences are eerier than the funeral home where several
Yankee prospects have lived.

OLD FORGE, Pa. — The most notorious residence in the Yankees’
minor-league system comes with a furnished bedroom, a cozy
porch, ample street parking and a handy private side
entrance.

One downside: the dead bodies housed underneath the
apartment.

“I’ve seen people getting wheeled in and out a few times,
which was a little — different,” said Yankees relief pitcher
Chad Green, who lived in the apartment here in early 2017.
“The place was nice. As soon as you got over the fact you’re
staying in a funeral home, it was fine.”

Many ballplayers describe getting called up to the majors as
a dream come true, but for some Yankees, their last stop
before reaching the Bronx is a setting more fit for
nightmares: an apartment above a funeral parlor on a sleepy
corner of this city of about 8,000 people.

Less-than-desirable living situations aren’t uncommon for the
many minor leaguers but few are
as eerie as the apartment where several Scranton/Wilkes-Barre
RailRiders have ended up while playing in one of the smallest
markets to host a Class AAA team.

When Clint Frazier was traded to the Yankees’ organization in
July 2016, he moved in above the funeral home with two
teammates at the time, Ben Gamel and Cito Culver. Frazier was
mired in a slump, and since his new roommates were thriving
at the plate, he figured living among the bottles of
embalming fluid and caskets might prove to be a talisman.

“It didn’t save my season,” Frazier said.

He lasted about one month before moving into a hotel. The
breaking point came one Saturday morning when he awoke to the
sounds of a funeral service taking place downstairs.

“That’s when I was like, ‘I’ve got to get out of this
place,’” Frazier said. “It’s nice on the inside, but it’s a
very eerie feeling. I could hear the stuff going on in the
basement. That’s not cool, man. I would never in a million
years go back.”

Frazier, somewhat surprisingly, is an outlier in his feelings
toward rooming with the dead. Many players are
comfortable surrounded by the macabre, and even
recommend the experience; the apartment has a reputation in
the RailRiders clubhouse as one of the lusher accommodations
available in the area.

As Gamel points out, when it comes to minor-league living, it
can get much worse than staying above a funeral home. “It’s
not the dead you’ve got to worry about,” said Gamel, now an
outfielder with the Milwaukee Brewers.

The home in Old Forge, Pa., about five miles from the
RailRiders’ ballpark in Moosic, belongs to Bob Gillette,
whose family has operated Ferri & Gillette Funeral
Services for 78 years.

About eight years ago, after his grandmother died, Gillette
renovated the space on the top floor of the building where
she had lived to make two apartments. Pat Revello, Gillette’s
neighbor who had been renting out properties to ballplayers
since the early 2000s — including above a pizzeria he owns —
suggested offering the apartments to RailRiders.

Currently, pitcher David Hale resides in the smaller of the
two spaces. Gillette listed Scott Sizemore, John Ryan Murphy
and Shane Greene as former tenants. The larger apartment goes
for $1,200 a month, with the smaller space renting for $800.
All utilities are included, and sometimes two or three
players live in one apartment to save money.

“We’re big Yankees fans,” Gillette said. “The guys, they’ve
been so great. They see my kids in the yard, and they taught
my son to throw the proper way.”

Gillette did not recall ever hosting an unruly tenant. There
are moments, though, that have made lodgers feel uneasy.

One night when Gamel and Tyler Austin were living at the
funeral parlor, smoke from the basement furnaces triggered
the building’s fire alarms. But with no smoke visible in the
players’ rooms, the players immediately suspected mystic
forces at play. Austin asked if he could spend the night with
Gamel.

“Tyler used to sleep on the ground in my room,” Gamel said.
“Nights where he’s feeling a little sketchy. I was used to
it.”

Austin, now with the San Francisco Giants, called the
apartment a “relatively nice place,” but said he had to be
extra careful on certain days.

“The thing that was kind of weird was some mornings we’d wake
up and there was a service going on downstairs,” he said.
“I’d have to really be quiet because I don’t want them
hearing me walk around up top as they’re going through their
service.”

Gamel added that the funeral home was quite serene compared
with other minor league dwellings. Minor-league salaries vary
widely depending on signing bonuses and service time, but
players in Class AAA can make as little as $2,150 a month
before dues and taxes, and only during the season, making it
hard to find optimal living spaces.

RailRiders second baseman Gosuke Katoh lived with six other
players in a two-bedroom apartment in Bensalem, Pa., when he
played for the Class AA Trenton Thunder last year. He
recalled two murders in the neighborhood while he lived
there.

“We definitely don’t live in the best neighborhoods,” Katoh
said. “The places we do live, the team apartments, I mean
it’s nice that they let us stay there. It’s whatever we can
get.”

To make sure his players don’t have similar experiences while
with his club, Josh Olerud, the RailRiders’ team president
and general manager, tacks on broker duties to his daily
responsibilities. In recent years, he has built a catalog of
available properties and personally inspects sites before a
player moves in.

“I check out every single home,” Olerud said. “You don’t want
to send someone somewhere that’s not going to be livable.”

The team pays for a three-night hotel stay for players upon
their arrival, and some newcomers choose extended hotel stays
if they can negotiate a reasonable rate. When players choose
to search on their own, unexpected challenges can arise.

During spring training, pitchers David Sosebee and Cale
Coshow could not find anything to their liking on websites
like Craigslist or Zillow, but their teammate Danny Coulombe
met a woman on his flight to Scranton who mentioned she lived
in a duplex with a vacant apartment.

When Sosebee and Coshow arrived the morning before their
first home game to move in, they figured they must have
gotten lost.

“We pulled up and I was like, ‘This has got to be the wrong
place,’” Sosebee said. “It’s kind of like an auto body, slash
junkyard, slash I think the guy sells cars out of there, too.
There’s a bunch of cars in the back, mechanics everywhere.
That’s our house.” All in all, though, he sounded satisfied
with his new home.

Among those who stick to Olerud’s tips, players recognized a
sense of civic pride from their landlords. Some proprietors
forgo broker’s fees or security deposits and offer
month-to-month or six-month leases, which helps minor
leaguers facing unpredictable seasons. Gleyber Torres, who
went on to finish third in the 2018 American League Rookie of
the Year Award vote, spent the beginning of last season in an
apartment that included access to a personal man cave,
complete with a gym and golf simulators.

“Peace of mind,” said Olerud, sounding almost like a funeral
director himself, “is a big thing.”

James Wagner contributed
reporting from San Francisco.

Correction
: May 15, 2019

An earlier version of this article misspelled the surname
of a pitcher in one instance. He is Cale Coshow, not
Coshnow.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page
B7 of the New York edition with
the headline: As Yankee Prospects Near the Majors, Some
Wind Up Living With the Dead. | |

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